Body Politics and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Indian Writing in English, with reference to Anita Nair and Meena Kandasamy’s Selected Fictional Works

Paper Code: 
ENG 144 (a) - Option 11

Unit I

 

Western Feminist Discourse on Women in the Third World                                                                                               Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes…”

 

Feminist Thought in India                                                                                              

Jasbir Jain and Avadhesh Kumar Singh’s “Positioning the ‘Post’ in Post - Feminism...”  

Unit II

Politics of the Body

Ketu H. Katrak’s “Cultural ‘Traditions’ Exiling the Female Body”

Unit III

 

Female Subjectivity: Women’s Experience and Identity  

Radha Chakravarty’s “Subjectivity and the Woman Writer” 

Unit IV

Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe (2001)

Unit V

 

Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017)

SUGGESTED READINGS: 

Suggested Reading:

Chakravarty, Radha. “Introduction : Subjectivity and the Woman Writer.” Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers: Rethinking Subjectivity. New Delhi: Routledge, 2007. 

 

Das, Veena. “The Body as Metaphor: Socialization of Women in Punjabi Urban Families.” Manushi  28. (1985): 2-6. 

---. “Violence, Gender and Subjectivity” in Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 37: 283-99, October 2008.

Jain, Jasbir and Avadhesh Kumar Singh. Indian Feminisms. Creative Books, 2001. 

Katrak, Ketu, H. “Cultural “Traditions” Exiling the Female Body.” The Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. Rutgers Univ. Press, 2006. 156-208. 

Mohanty, Chandra. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61-88.

 

Sarkar, Tanika and Urvashi Butalia. Ed. Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays. Kali for Women, 1995.  

Academic Year: 
2019-2020